Friday, April 23, 2010

The week is over, the long weekend is here, hurrah! What a week. However hurried it was and harried I was, I somehow still managed to get in the kitchen for a bit of stress relief (which is the act of cooking, not eating, so huzzah!) every night. And there's plenty more to come, since my first delivery from Fresh Fish Online came today! Salmon, flake, blue-eye, scallops, mussels, and octopus! My freezer is filled to bursting, and there are goodies already waiting in the fridge for us to enjoy over our three day break. So far, I've tried the mussels, since they should always be consumed within 24 hours of purchase, and if the rest of the delivery lives up to the same quality, I'll be in heaven! So it'll be seafood at least once per day for the next couple of weeks, yay!

Meanwhile, I figured out a way to recommend key readings from the blogs I read (an idea that was then reinforced by a commenter on my last post, thanks!) - Google Reader allows you to 'share' any posts that you like, and individuals with Google accounts can then follow your shared items list. Now that Google own Blogger, the two have joined forces and I have added the new Shared Items widget in the sidebar on the right, and labeled it Girl Gone Sharin'. So if you don't like to follow lots of blogs but would like to keep up with key discoveries and arguments, then check out that list - I think you can even subscribe to it...

Okay, time for the good stuff - here's my working week in review, meal by meal (separated through time by quite a bit of fasting - hello show season!):

Grilled salmon topped with butter, with a bit of free-range ham.

A hot-smoked salmon fillet, served cold.

Green eggs & lamb!

Pork roast, topped with seasoned salt, pre-cooking.

Same roast, post-cooking. The spices in the salt spread through the skin, into the fat, and across the meat itself. Oh wow. Naturally, I ate all the crackling and a sliver of meat, whereas the beau smashed the majority of the lean. Insert Jack Sprat references here.

A Creole-spiced, hot-smoked salmon fillet, served cold. Delicious!

Smoked salmon and buttery lamb.

Grilled rockling, topped with anchovies and butter.

Roasted chicken drumsticks, with seasoned salt coating.

Mussels! Such hard work preparing mussels - all the scrubbing and de-bearding before you can even get them in the pot and hope they open! I wonder if, after all that, there's any positive calorie balance left... Worth it though!

4 comments:

Came across this today and thought you might be interested after reading about you cooking mussels and hoping they open - turns out it doesn't matter!http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/10/29/2404364.htm

darwinstable - Grass-fed of course! In Australia, it's actually hard to find grain-fed meat; you can find grain-fed beef sold at a premium price at the fancier steak restaurants. Since we have so much pasture in Victoria and NSW, grass the cheaper option. Some stocks are given supplemental grain over winter, particularly on breeding farms (like my Dad's farm), but it's not very much. The farm I buy from is in a lusher part of Victoria than my childhood farm, so they don't need to supplement with grain, although I bet they have some on hand in case of drought, etc. It doesn't both me, and it means that the average Australian eating supermarket meat has it a lot better than those in the US, even with the small amounts of antibiotics used to pre-empt infection (which isn't as prevalent here as in the factory farms overseas). One of the main reasons I go organic & grass-fed is to support the little guy - farmers who said no to the big supermarkets because they didn't believe in giving their stock the mandatory anti-biotic shot. I also buy bio-dynamic lamb & beef when I can as that means the farmers are also taking particular care of the top soil, our most precious resource (in my opinion, anyway).

Darran - wow, thanks for that! I would never have thought to chuck out any that didn't close except that when I looked up the cooking time it told me that mussels that wouldn't open were therefore dead and likely to be in some phase of decomposure! So now I know I probably tossed out four perfectly good mussels, boo!

Donald - sounds delicious! My seasoned salt is by the Original Smoke & Spice Co, and the ingredients are as follows: "natural sun dried sea salt that has been tea tree smoked then tumble roasted with garlic, coriander, shallots, mustard seed, Australian bush pepper and the mighty chilli!" It's utterly amazing stuff!

Girl Gone Paginatin'

Girl Gone Searchin'

I cut out grains, sugar and starches at the beginning of 2009. I have been keeping a journal as I have progressively shed my bulges and my processed foods. I am aiming to live a clean, primal lifestyle, and I wish to share my eating habits with those who wish to clean up their lifestyle and live happily and healthfully. As the cliche states - if I can do it, so can everybody else.